ROMAN SCHOOL, HALF OF THE 17th CENTURY

Bacchanal

Oil on canvas, cm. 97x131,5. Framed

This unpublished canvas of remarkable quality constitutes a particularly intriguing attributive puzzle. The painting has an old attribution to Giovan Francesco Romanelli who, if he gave account of a certain detectable Cortonesque pictorial matrix, as well as the refinement of the composition, in reality does not find stringent terms of confirmation in the painter's corpus. Furthermore, our canvas exhibits other distinctive characteristics that are not persuasively justified through the reference to Romanelli: the classicist elegance of Poussinian origin, first of all, which is confirmed in the analogies with works by Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy and François Perrier; but also the affinities that can be found from time to time with Pietro Testa, Andrea De Leone, Giacinto Gimignani and Pier Francesco Mola: a combination of elements that make our painting a sort of small summa of the main trends of post-Caravaggesque Roman painting between the fourth and fifth decade of the century. The studied postures of the naked bodies, the measured expressions of the faces, bordering on vagueness, and the intangible relations of affection that unite the various actors of this far from wildly Dionysian feast confer a mysterious aura and an almost melancholy to the scene, pushing the canvas into that "philosophical" propensity so present in Roman art of the time.
PROVENANCE: Private collection, Umbria.